Barack Obama Quotes

I don't want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people.

The President was a responsibility beyond that of managing the government. He has a responsibility as a moral leader.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

The president has to have the trust, earn the trust, maintain the trust of people in order to lead. And there's nothing that will lose it quicker than a sense that he's in it for a quick buck.

Government never falls lower than when decent people dutifully excuse their leaders' sins.

And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.

I know I've done the right thing but I couldn't feel worse about it, and I suppose that is part of what it is to lead.

Leaders can be moral-and they should be moral-without imposing their morality on others.

Donald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president. But he was not actively malign, in the sense that he did what he thought was right. I don't think this guy cares what's right. I think he's in it for self-aggrandizement, for profit, and for power.

I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Those who really deserve praise are the people who, while human enough to enjoy power, nevertheless pay more attention to justice than they are compelled to do by their situation.

Leaders must understand that some people will inevitably sell out to the evil side. Don't waste your time wondering why; spend your time discovering who.

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

The president has an obligation to serve all the people of America.

I spend a lot of time trying to not do anything bad to anyone, but you can't live your life and not hurt people.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

People elect the President for reasons that have nothing to do with his ability to be president.

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe's 'conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action'; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind.

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

The hope for an American is different from the hope of a Syrian. For me, I should be the hope of the Syrian, not any other one, not American, neither French, nor anyone in the world. I'm President to help the Syrian people.

Some people say they will follow their conscience..many of us have dead consciences. Your conscience is no longer a safe guide. You've harden it, you've deaden it.

Most men only commit great crimes because of their scruples about petty ones.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.